letter manipulation/warping

[madness69]

Im using photoshop 7 to skin a spit IXc.Im trying to put the big letters on the fusilage behind the cockpit ,but they look funny in game.I Tried warping but i cant get it to look right. I looked at another skin but i just cant figure out how to make the letter twist that way.

Also Im pretty new at this but I was wondering If u an skin with photoshop cs3?? Do people only use photoshop 7 because of macs remove white????

Thanks

[Serval]

Point is that you have to transform about half the letter and not the whole letter.
This cannot be done with letters in text mode.
Zo, get the letters as good as you can in Text mode. Rasterize the layer and then select the part the should be transformed and select the transform tools to change the selection to your need.

[kristorf]

Good luck mate, the Spit Vb/IX series are (in my opinion) the hardest to add codes to due to the warping that starts level with the canopy rear edge back to the tail, with an upward twist as well.

[Serval]

OH, Filters can be used with all version of Photoshop.
So Remove White works also with CS through CS3
I'm using CS myself

[madness69]

thanks. But If u could go into a bit more detail that would be awesome. I figured out how to rasterize the layer,but i dont realy know what it means.also I dont really know what u mean by "select the part the should be transformed and select the transform tools to change the selection to your need. "

Thanks

[adlabs6]

What Serval means...
Use the marquee tools to select a part of the text which you wish to have a different shape. Probably this is an entire letter. Now use the 'transform' tool (CTRL + T in my Photoshop) to make any kinds of skew, tilt, or other actions you want. Just move along the entire part that needs adjustment doing this, it's slow and tedious, but as with the other skins you saw, it can be done to look pretty good.

[Serval]

Text and paths are vectors and no pixels. This means that the cmputer calculates the lines. This is really great for scaling them up and down.
But PHotoshop itself works best with pixels. A photo and also our skins simply exists of colored dots.

Now if we look at a text layer and use the transform tool, you will see that some transform options are greyed out.


Also there is no possability to select a part of the text and transform only that part.

When we have rasterized the layer (i.e. converted it from vectors to dots) we have all transform options available and also can apply the transfom on a selected part of the text.
Here I scale the upper half of the text, which is more or less what you also need to do with the Spitfire. The Distort option might be helpfull to scale one side more then the other.


Net I select the right half of the text and skew it. This also is an action you need to do to get the text right.


And finally a bit of an example how bad the text looks in the skin. But in game it will look pretty good. Look at skins from other people to see how they distorted the text to get it show right in the game. That will give you an idea about what you need to do.
In game the distorted parts will look a bit blurry, since the game itself distorts it again (that is why you need to do this all in the first place). There is nothing to change that.

[madness69]

Wow!! thanks so much. Thats a great help.....